.NET 3.5 SP1 Beta & VS2008 SP1 Beta

SP1 Beta for the .NET Framework 3.5 and the SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2008 have been released. You can read about the new stuff on ScottGu’s Blog.

There are two thing on the new release of .NET that interest me above others the GPU-based effects and the new WriteableBitmap class that I plan to use in future Pixa’s features and I will cover them in future posts.

If you want to learn more on GPU-based Effects for WPF, keep an eye on Greg Schechter’s Blog.

Pixa Color & Brush panels

This is a brief introduction to Pixa’s Color & Brush Panels.

Color Panel

1. The color panel allows you to select the current drawing color by clicking on the selecting area.

   
    

2. You pick a color from anywhere in the application window with the picker tool and double click on the desired color.
    
3. To select a color manually press on the button to open the manual color selection panel.

   
   

4. Pixa has an option to save working palettes with different styles. The current palette style is the color list on the bottom of the panel.

   You have two viewing options for the palette style list, one as a list and one as grid, to switch between them click on the view mode button .

   

Brush Panel

1. The brush panel let you select, add and edit custom made drawing and erasing brushes.

   

2. To add new brushes to the list just press on the Add button and a new brush will be added to the list.
   
3. To remove a brush, first select it and then press the Remove button.
   
4. To edit a brush press on the Edit button, an option panel will be open; to save the changes and to close the panel, press the Edit button again.

    

And thanks to famfamfam for the free icons used in Pixa.

 

Enjoy!

Pixa – the drawing tool

I’m happy to introduce you to Pixa!

Pixa is a drawing program that takes full advantage of WPF. While it looks like a typical raster editor it is actually a vector editor, every stroke you paint on Pixa is actually a Geometry object, this allows you to zoom and resize without affecting the drawing quality.

I have launched a CodePlex project for Pixa, so you can download and play with it or contribute if you wish.

Please take into consideration that Pixa is a “PRE-ALPHA” version and is a long way from stable, I’m releasing it now so I can get feedback and share it with you (if you are interested in the code or your have an artistic soul ).

I will talk in following posts about Pixa’s roadmap, features and explain how I implemented some of the main features.

I will be happy to know what you think.

WPF Enhancements

Scott Guthrie blogged about the .NET 3.5 client product roadmap. Check out the post for full detail, and here’s a short list of the things to expect:

1. DropShadow and Blur Bitmap effects will be hardware accelerated.
2. Improvements on Text.
3. Media and Video Performance.
4. New WriteableBitmap API will enable real time bitmap manipulation.
5. New Controls like DataGrid, Ribbon and Calendar/DatePicker.
6. Improvements on the VS 2008 WPF Designer.

And one more thing you do not need to recompile your applications to befit from the new features!!! As long as you have the latest updates installed.

Introduction to custom designers

Yogev Cohen is writing a series about creating your own custom designers, which is useful if your create control libraries or you are just intrigued about how this things work.

1. Create your own Designer or Introduction To Custom Designers – Part 1- Designer
2. Create your own Designer or Introduction To Custom Designers – Part 2- UI, Glyphs

And he had promise me to post about custom designer for WPF controls in the future!!

Debugging .NET Framework Source Code

On October last year Scott Guthrie blogged about Microsoft plans to release the .NET Framework Source Code to enable debugging support with Visual Studio 2008, well the moment is come and now you can browse and debug the source code of the following libraries:

.NET Base Class Libraries:
System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections
System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics
System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO
System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime
System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc.

ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)
Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)
ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

And soon the LINQ, WCF and the Workflow Foundation will be added.

You can find a detailed post by Shawn Burke that explains the exact steps on how to enable this.

Using Merged Resource Dictionaries inside Themes/generic.xaml

For some reason including a ResourceDictionary into the Themes/generic.xaml does not behave the same as including a ResourceDictionary into App.xaml.

If you include a ResouceDictionary into Themes/generic.xaml you will receive an exception telling you that the dictionary cannot be assigned to property ‘Source’ of object, yada, yada, yada, very informative.

Exception:’MyDictionary.xaml’ value cannot be assigned to property ‘Source’ of object ‘System.Windows.ResourceDictionary’. Cannot loc
ate resource ‘mydictionary.xaml’.  Error at object ‘System.Windows.ResourceDictionary’, Line 9 Position 23.

What the exception is trying to tell you is that the included ResourceDictionary file was not found on the output folder, (meaning that it was expected to be an external resource).

What to do then, instead of:

<ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>

    <ResourceDictionary Source=”MyDictionary.xaml” />

</ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>

You should write it like this (specifying that the included resource is embedded into the assembly):

<ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>

    <ResourceDictionary Source=”/My.Controls;component/themes/MyDictionary.xaml” />

</ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>

Microsoft Expression Blend 2 December Preview is Here

The Microsoft Expression Blend 2 December Preview is here. Some of the new features are: Support for VS2008, Path Editing and Animation, Adding Multiple Projects to a single solution and etc.

Enjoy.

Open Source CD/DVD burning tool.

A week ago I came across InfraRecorder, an open source CD/DVD burning tool.

After being disappointed from the burning features of Windows Vista, I was very happy from what I found.

It works very well under Windows Vista. It doesn’t require installation and its only 8MB in size, what’s make it suitable for running it from a DiskOnKey.

You can download it from here.

Enjoy.

RadioButton IsChecked Binding Problem in .NET 3.5 RTM

I have written two posts in the past about a bug in WPF’s RadioButton IsChecked property change notification.

On my first post I described the problem and in second post I proposed and demonstrated a workaround to the problem.

Now after the release of the .NET Frameworks 3.5, I checked it again and hoping that it was fixed, but unfortunately it wasn’t fixed . But the same workarounds that I described in my previous post in this issue still do the jobs.